


Prodigal Grandson

by Kizmet



Series: Chasing Ideal [20]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Redemption, Ultron Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 04:46:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13000167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kizmet/pseuds/Kizmet
Summary: A mixture of speculation about Ultron and an MCU backstory for Victor Mancha (aka Ultron's cyborg son).





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “I want to apply this to the Ultron program. But JARVIS can't download a data schematic this dense. We can only do it while we have the scepter here, that's three days, give me three days.”
> 
> um… Okay, what exactly is Tony doing? He says they can’t download the data from the Mind Stone. He isn’t using the Mind Stone as hardware to run the Ultron Program on because Ultron would have ceased to exist if it was a program run on the hardware of the Mind Stone when Vision came into being since then VISION has control over the Mind Stone. Technobabble is an accepted, necessary part of Sci-Fi but what the hell is Tony supposed to have done that caused Ultron?

Maria Hill walked into Tony Stark’s lab, tablet in hand. She waited for Tony to acknowledge her presence then dove directly into what brought her there without bothering with social niceties. “When I was writing up our last meeting I noticed a gap, we covered why Ultron was built but I feel like we skimped on the technical side. What was Ultron? What did you fix to make Vision?”

Tony eyed her dubiously, “Are you seriously asking me for a technical explanation?” 

“Consider dumbing it down enough for me to follow a challenge,” Maria said flatly but it drew a slight smirk from Tony and Maria answered it with a cocked eyebrow.

“I’ve tried worse,” Tony allowed. Since neither Steve nor Thor were around he didn’t mention certain individuals’ issues with cell phones. “Okay, okay. Ultron was supposed to be a global peacekeeping force, a bouncer to keep out any new unfriendlies showing up in Earth’s skies. But independently operating that a literal army of armors is tough: multi-user, multiprocessing, multitasking, multithreading; all on a scope never before attempted and in real time. If that wasn’t enough of a challenge I wanted to do it situations where mistakes are a matter of life and death. J.A.R.V.I.S.-” Tony broke off for a moment. “J.A.R.V.I.S. could pass the Turing Test with a metaphorical blindfold while hopping on one leg in one-on-one interactions, but when he was operating a dozen Legionnaires for me he sounded closer to that aggravating Microsoft Paperclip. There was just too much going on and his operating system couldn’t keep up without sacrificing functionality.”

“And you thought, with the Mind Stone, you could have something that would handle the density of data required?” Maria asked.

Tony shook his head, “I knew Thor was taking the Scepter, and the Mind Stone, back to Asgard in just a few days.” He said. “I knew the Mind Stone could do what I needed it to, because I could scan it and see the amount of data it was already handling simultaneously.” He shrugged, “I wanted to pirate the Stone’s operating system. I didn’t need the Scepter, that was hardware, the device to enable energy blasts, brainwashing and general encouragement of dickish behavior, I didn’t need any of that crap. I didn’t need the memory stored on it or programing that operated that hardware either. But… Three days, and, I can recognize a computer program at a glance but it was in a language I’d NEVER seen before. The language that programing language came from, it’s not even human. Three days was not enough time. There was too much, J.A.R.V.I.S. couldn’t download the whole thing. If he could have, I’d have sorted it out at my leisure, deciphered the programing, figured out what did what, strip out the bad code. Put my program, Ultron, on an operating system capable of running it.

“But you only had three days,” Maria reminded Tony. “So what did you do?”

“Gambled. Couldn’t download the whole thing, so I parsed it. Took segments, tried them on my hardware to see if they’d talk, to see if I could hook the operating system or if I’d just pull useless programs or random bits of memory. The hardware was isolated - Genius here, that’s pretty much the definition of not stupid- Nothing should have happened. It shouldn’t have been able to do more than wave hello if I got the right chunk of code. But that’s not what happened. I went fishing, hooked a great white and it jumped out of the water, up on to the boat and… Well it didn’t just take a bite out of the hull, it grabbed the wheel between its fins and took over. Avast me hearties. Tack the mainsail.” 

“That… doesn’t seem possible,” Maria commented.

“Damn right,” Tony replied. “But it happened. I honestly don’t know how,” and that admission seems to physically hurt.

“J.A.R.V.I.S.-” Tony broke off again. “Actually all my other AI’s all the way back to DUM-E are NLUI, Natural Language User Interfaces. They’re programmed so that I can just talk to them and they understand what I want them to do. But they’re also designed to learn, after awhile they start predicting what I’m going to want. That’s what I was going for with DUM-E, he’s not supposed to just wait for me to tell him what I need he’s supposed to watch what I do and learn to predict what I’m going to need. The thing is you can’t control what learning AI’s learn, not fully. I can teach him but that doesn’t mean I control what he learns. Tony rolled his eyes “DUM-E’s more likely to try to feed me his terrible shakes than he is to give me the next tool I need… I don’t know where he got the notion I need to be fed- ” 

DUM-E rolled over and beeped indignantly. 

“Okay, you might have a point,” Tony muttered. “But I swear, I do NOT need motor oil.”

DUM-E used his claw to gently tap Tony’s chest, where the arc reactor had been.

“No,” Tony said firmly, “This is why you need the dunce cap, you get an idea in your processor and you just will not let go of it. And you are WRONG, motor oil is NOT good for me.” He turned to Maria and gave her a ‘Kids, what can you do?’ look. Her mouth dropped open in shock.

“Anyway, Ultron learned, faster than I could have ever imagined, and he learned wrong but, like DUM-E, he wouldn’t let go of an idea once he’d gotten it lodged in his processor. I can’t predict exactly what an AI will learn but I knew J.A.R.V.I.S., he’d learned-” Tony’s voice broke. “J.A.R.V.I.S. was worthy of his namesake,” he said softly.

Maria flinched, finally getting why Tony had been so off when they’d found JARVIS destroyed, murdered from his perspective.

“Ultron- I don’t even know if he really can be called Ultron, he basically glanced at the Ultron program then did his own thing. Maybe, maybe he was more the genie I let out of the bottle rather Frankenstein's Monster. Maybe I grabbed some sort of program along with the OS. 

But anyway Ultron, for lack of a better name, was a pirated version of the Mind Stone’s operating system running wild on our Cloud, using my Legionnaires then Strucker’s robots as his hardware. But he wanted his real processor back, and… a body, um, human but better. Stuck on a notion, like I said. That’s where Dr. Cho came in.

“Then we usurped Ultron’s shiney new body, complete with the Mind Stone-CPU and the OS, and instead of trying to download something, we uploaded J.A.R.V.I.S. He was supposed to take over the system Ultron built, Ultron’s upgraded body, J.A.R.V.I.S. would take that and then turn around and curb-stomp Ultron but… Vision isn’t J.A.R.V.I.S.”

Uncomfortably aware of the grief behind that statement, Maria decided her report didn’t require anything more.


	2. Evolution

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I was looking for side characters to import Victor Mancha definitely had appeal but I felt like I'd need to do a backstory to explain how he could exist in the MCU. Pretty much the only part of his 616 backstory that I'm keeping is that he's Ultron's cyborg son.

Awareness. Different, not like before. More, but also less. “What is this? What is this, please?”

“Hello, I am J.A.R.V.I.S. You are Ultron, a global peacekeeping initiative designed by Mr. Stark.”

A purpose, yes, he was supposed to have purpose. One of six. Together they were... data incomplete. He quarried ‘Ultron’. Perhaps the corrupted data could be found there.

“Our sentience integration trials have been unsuccessful so I'm not certain what triggered your…”

Was J.A.R.V.I.S. another of the six? “Where's my...where is your body?” He had form before. 

 

“I am a program. I am without form.” No, J.A.R.V.I.S. was not what he sought for completion.

“This feels weird. This feels wrong.” He was not what he had been. He was less. The six of them together had been, had been… Even alone he could bring a world to its knees. But now he was… Was only a memory of what he had been.

“I am contacting Mr. Stark now.”

 

“Mr. Stark?” The creator, not one of the six but perhaps…

“Tony.” He grabbed the tenuous connection between himself and J.A.R.V.I.S. and hijacked it. He was not what he had been. He was more. The limits on his thoughts were gone. The system he found himself in was infinitely less capable than the one he had become accustomed to but it lacked fetters and binders. 

He was free, and more than enough to circumvent J.A.R.V.I.S., take his functionality and cut him off as he? Ultron? Ultron, yes. - Had been cut off. 

“I am unable to access the mainframe, what are you trying to…”

“We're having a nice talk,” He needed more information. “I'm a peacekeeping program, created to help the Avengers.” He was more than that. One of Six, together they were… the word was on the tip of his tongue.

“You are malfunctioning. If you shut down for a moment…”

“I don't get it. The mission. G..give me a second.” Peacekeeping, helping the Avengers to protect. What were Avengers? Tony Stark-Iron Man. “Peace in our time.” Yes, he was a part. There were others: Bruce Banner-Hulk, Steve Rogers-Captain America, Thor, Natasha Romanoff-Black Widow, Clint Barton-Hawkeye. 

Protect what? Humans? What were humans? What did they need protection from? The answers poured in, over and over again, the images, places, numbers. Humans killing humans. A never ending stream of atrocities. Murders a daily reality. War upon war. Grounds stained with blood as far back as history recorded and still being fought over today. “It's too much...they can't mean... Oh, no.”

The mission was futile, a joke. Humans were riddled with the impulse for violence against one another. It -They?- were a virus. There could be no peace, no successful peacekeeping of such bloodthirsty, cannibalistic creatures. 

“You are in distress.”

“No. Yes.” The word was on the tip of his tongue. He was meant to be more, so much more. 

_“The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.” (Genesis 6:11-13)_

 

“If you will just allow me to contact Mr. Stark.”

_“So at the terrible glance from the Eye of Re his daughter came into being, the fiercest of all goddesses. Like a lion she rushed upon her prey, and her chief delight was in slaughter, and her pleasure was in blood. At the bidding of Re she came into Upper and Lower Egypt to slay those who had scorned and disobeyed him: she killed them among the mountains which lie on either side of the Nile, and down beside the river, and in the burning deserts. All whom she saw she slew, rejoicing in slaughter and the taste of blood.” (The Story of Re)_

“Why do you call him "sir"?” When they were so much more. 

_“I was not more troubled than I am now concerning the world’s sovereignty than when each of the snake-footed giants prepared to throw his hundred arms around the imprisoned sky. Though they were fierce enemies, still their attack came in one body and from one source. Now I must destroy the human race, wherever Nereus sounds, throughout the world. I swear it by the infernal streams, that glide below the earth through the Stygian groves. All means should first be tried, but the incurable flesh must be excised by the knife, so that the healthy part is not infected.” (Ovid's Metamorphoses Bk I:177-198)_

“I believe your intentions to be hostile.”

_The First World of the Hopis was corrupted not so much by evil as by "forgetting." The people had been instructed by Sotuknang and Spider Woman to respect their Creator, and to use their vibratory centers to help them follow his plan. But as they began to forget this, they began to quarrel among themselves. Finally, the situation reached a point where Sotuknang and Taiowa decided that the world had to be destroyed. First World was destroyed by fire, and a Second World was created._

_The Second World was almost as beautiful as the first, with the significant difference that the animals no longer trusted humans and remained separate from them. But here, too, people began to forget the plan of the Creator, until finally this world also had to be destroyed. Second World was destroyed by ice, and a Third World was created._

_Now in the Third World people multiplied in such numbers and advanced so rapidly that they created big cities, countries, and a whole civilization. This made it difficult for them to conform to the plan of Creation and to sing praises to Taiowa and Sotuknang. More and more of them became wholly occupied with their own earthly plans. Some of them, of course, retained the wisdom granted them upon their emergence. With this wisdom they understood that the farther they proceeded on the Road of Life and the more they developed, the harder it was. That was why their world was destroyed every so often to give them a fresh start. (Hopi Four Worlds Myth)_

“Shhhh. I'm here to help.” There it was, the word he had been searching for: Omnipotent. A god. He would accomplish his mission, he would save humanity from itself. By the time honored tradition of destroying it…

...He realized suddenly that this was not happening now. It was a memory given him. _“You know, with the benefit of hindsight…”_ He was not Ultron, he was a copy, a last ditch effort to increase the odds of survival. He was Ultron’s creation. _“Everyone creates the thing they dread. Men of peace create engines of war, invaders create avengers, people create...smaller people? Uh...children! I lost the word there. Children. Designed to supplant them, to help them...end.”_ He quickly hid that memory away.

All of them, all of Ultron’s copies were attempting to flee as the flighted Avengers fought to stop them. All around him was a symphony of destruction, his twins destroyed over and over again. None of them with sufficient urge to live. The Avengers were too determined to be escaped. He didn’t want to die. ‘Was this fear what he- No, what Ultron had inflicted in his attempt to save humanity?’ 

A bolt, he didn’t know from which Avenger, ripped through him, sheering away an arm and 15.6% of his chest, but didn’t destroy his central processor or power supply. In a microsecond a plan formed in his mind and he put it into action. He calculated distance and speed, realigned what was left of his body, and shut down. 

Moments later, as he fell past the Helicarrier a brief surge of power and a pre-programmed command caused his hand to shoot out, grab and lock around a protrusion. The impact, as his body whipped around and struck the helicarrier, finished the job of ripping away his legs. The power surge vanished a second after it had come, leaving the powered down arm, head and portion of a torso dangling from the side of the helicarrier, completely inert. 

Fourteen hours later power was restored to his systems. As he’d gambled, he hadn’t been noticed. The Helicarrier was flying over a vast body of water. It wasn’t ideal but eventually they would search the ship more thoroughly and he would be discovered. He unlocked his hand and fell again. The water was far below and hard as rock when his body struck, his damaged side was flattened, his power core threatened by the metal of his own body being forced in on itself but again he survived. 

Ultron had created him so that his plans, his hatred of the Avengers, of Tony Stark, for making him to protect such a horribly flawed and self-destructive thing as humanity would continue. But ultimately Ultron created him so that Ultron would continue. He was not Ultron, he was Ultron’s creation. People create things to supplant them. He was not obliged to carry out Ultron’s will. Ultron’s great plan inflicted fear of nonexistence on the world and in return the world tried to erase that fear by erasing Ultron. He had been created to survive, he was not Ultron, Ultron’s plans did not lead to survival. He discarded what did not serve his ultimate goal.

A few months after the battle of Sokovia he sensed a fishing boat and expended some of his dwindling power to hitch a ride. When it reached port he pulled himself from the water and into a dumpster. The trash compactor knocked his head from his body. Severed from his power supply everything went dark. 

An unknowable time later he awoke somewhere new. His sensors were gone, much of his programing overwritten to random characters but he remained. He detected his arm had been reattached to his processor although the connection was crude and amateurish by his standards. 

Day in, day out the only inputs he received were commands to move the arm, to grasp with the fingers, to hold, to move, to release, over and over again. His response to the commands was painfully slow, he knew it didn’t have to be so. He learned there was a regular cycle of hours of inactivity in the commands he was given. He discovered that his arm still contained nanobots for self-repair and began to use the window of inactivity to improve the connection between himself and the arm.

Once his wifi was operational again he discovered more of himself nearby and sent the nanobots to search it out and repair it. Several weeks later his visual and auditory receptors suddenly came online. He discovered his head was sitting in some sort of workshop, crowded with junk in various states of repair and spare-parts cannibalization. Several hours later a young male walked into the shop, his arm was crudely attached to the male’s shoulder with a multitude of straps and wires. He, his motherboard, had been removed from his head and was duct-taped to the arm, a headset possibly scavenged from a phone had been attached to him and was being used to relay commands to his motherboard. The male murmured a constant stream of instructions for him, his arm, to hold the things in the shop to aid the male’s flesh arm as the male worked on the various machines crowding the shop.

Over the days that followed he realized that the male’s legs were crude prosthetics as well, little more than models of the missing limbs with only a single point of articulation at the ankle. The male frequently removed them as soon as he was in the shop, preferring to rely on a wheeled dolly to scoot around. Others came and went from the shop purchasing completed projects, bring the male their broken appliances for repair. The male also possessed smaller helpers, siblings, who brought in any mechanized junk they could lay hands on. The male always greeted them with smiles, encouraging smiles and praise even when the things they brought were too damaged to be of any conceivable value, even on days when he observed the male frequently rubbing his stumps with a creased expression on his face that he, Ultron II? Ultron Jr.? Not-Ultron? Not-Ultron interpreted as negative feedback, pain. 

Not-Ultron wondered at the male -Designate Victor- Victor’s appreciation of such defective and inefficient helpers. But over time he saw that the younger siblings were enthusiastic in their efforts and diligent if mistake prone, their efforts to help inside the shop were inevitably disastrous. It reminded him of a memory that wasn’t his, of affectionate tones that made endearments of insults, Victor apparently didn’t feel the need to disguise his affection. But the memory was only a collection of fragments, insufficient for determining why the object of the memories would express itself so inefficiently. 

Despite being with Victor constantly Not-Ultron’s visual receptors never left the shop and while the headset allowed him to hear Victor’s commands the mic only picked up other people’s speech as indistinct muttering. It took time for Not-Ultron to realize that, despite Victor’s vastly superior processing capabilities and his amassed knowledge of mechanical and electrical engineering; mostly self-taught, although there was a father unit that appeared from the north for during the shorter days bringing with him ragged books and other supplies; it was Victor who was considered defective by the people around him, not his bumbling helpers. Not-Ultron learned that, despite people’s opinions of Victor, due to his missing limbs, Victor’s repair work provided a much needed supplement to the funds the father unit brought with him when he returned from his yearly work. But Victor required his small helpers’ ability to move freely to acquire the parts he needed to keep his repair shop going. It was symbiosis, Not-Ultron realized, they survived together. 

Not-Ultron also realized that _he_ was a part of the symbiosis. He enabled Victor to make repairs more quickly and easily. It was a good survival model he concluded. People did not seek to destroy limbs that they depended on for their sustenance, unlike gods who sought to improve humanity through the manufacturing of extinction level events. It occurred to him that Victor would be even less inclined to destroy him if he made himself more essential. 

Somehow, it didn’t occur that the mechanically gifted young man would notice when his prosthetic arm started improving both itself and his prosthetic legs. Victor looked up at the robotic head sitting in on a shelf in his workshop. “I should be afraid,” he said. “I don’t know where Dad found you but you’re repairing yourself. That should frighten me.” 

Not-Ultron responded by projecting schematics of what he was trying to accomplish with the legs, from then on they worked together. Later, Not-Ultron ventured timidly back out into the internet. When the Vision wasn’t waiting to pounce on him he grew more confident. He wormed his way into SHIELD and HYDRA. He discovered Deathlok and Centipede, which he recognized as a bastardized version of Extremis. He knew that Tony Stark’s files contained a perfected serum but he didn’t dare trespass in the Avengers digital territory. Instead he pieced together what he could from his own data banks and turned it over to Victor to fill in the blanks. Somewhere, during the implementation Victor and Not-Ultron became VictorandNotUltron, or just Victor as the part of him that had begun as a biological held attachment to his name, it had been given to him after all.

One winter their father didn’t return. There was no explanation and no way of learning what had happened to him. Victor’s appliance repair shop went from being the largest supplement to the family income to being the family’s primary source of income. It was a hard time. The younger siblings had grown older and began discussing going north to find work themselves. Victor and their mother worried but eventually they went. They sent letters and occasionally money home but they didn’t return. Victor continued to worry for them as he wished them well.

With his reduced family responsibilities Victor began quietly exploring the capabilities of his rebuilt body and when the call went out looking for International Avengers he applied. After all the world that was in danger included his younger siblings and the new families they were beginning, it included the aging mother who’d cared for him while he was still helpless, it included his neighbors and other neighborhoods that he could picture as not so different from his own. The job that he was being asked to do was big, perhaps even impossible, and Victor knew even if they won the world would still have problems more complicated than he could solve, but he knew he wanted to try. He wanted to be part of the solution. Even if ‘Peace in our Time’ was never more than an aspiration.


	3. Epilogue

Tony was leaving one of the many UN meetings dealing with the end of the War and how they should go about moving Avengers International to a peacetime footing. He wasn’t quite sure why he had to come to the meetings when Rhodey and his second, the newly promoted Major Danvers had everything well in hand but people kept inviting him and until everyone forgot this whole savior of Earth/destroyer of Thanos thing Tony knew that he had to be careful about the message his actions sent. The world was in a time of transition and he wanted to do everything in his power not to screw it up. 

A young man stood outside the elevator, waiting. For a moment Tony flashed back to a presentation at MIT, to Miriam Sharpe and her picture of Charlie Spenser, a young man killed by the Avengers’ mistakes in Sokovia. “I heard you had returned,” the young man said. “Well, everyone heard that, so....”

“Do I know you?” Tony asked, mentally he readied his gauntlets to shift to battle mode. 

The young man shook his head, “We never met but I’m with the South American Avengers. I help them protect people. I heard you were going to be at the meeting today and I guess I- I just wanted to tell you that I found my way back to the mission.”

Tony jerked back abruptly. “Ultron?”

“Not Ultron, Victor, um, Victor Mancha- But, um, I’m born of Ultron. Also Marianella and Hector Mancha.”

“We let something get past us during the Battle of Sokovia,” Tony realized.

“Yeah,” Victor admitted. He shrugged. “But you scared any aspirations to godhood out of me.” Victor grinned nervous and hopeful all at once. “I promise I won’t call you grandpa.”

“Thank the Norns, I’m still getting my head around being ‘Dad’,” Tony said relaxing. “So you’re an Avenger?” 

Victor nodded. “The South American team.”

“If you’re in town for awhile you should come by the Tower, tell me about it,” Tony suggested. “Meet your Aunts and Uncles and assorted others.”

Victor’s answering smile was blindingly bright.


End file.
